The Lucky Ones by Julianne Pachico
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Lucky Ones is a collection of linked short stories about the fates of a group of wealthy Colombian schoolkids and their parents, servants and teachers affected by the country's war between 1993 and 2013. Each story's narrator is different and sometimes different points of view are portrayed, one chapter as wild as a bunny rabbit hooked on cocaine, another of a coke-sniffing hipster in the US and yet another of a birthday party for children on the Pablo Escobar-like estate with caged tigers of one of the parents; most are third person, but some are second or first person. Each story manages to be compelling and cover the horrors of war, disappearances, drug addiction and injury over the range of time periods and places near Cali where the author grew up.
The writing is exceptional and the book is compelling and well written. I couldn't put it down even in the face of Netflix latest streaming offer.


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Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Today I awoke eager to read more of the Yiyun Li memoir, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. Pondering her life and rich literary history, her teachers, her mentors, the books she wrote and read that mattered to her, she also circles back to her two suicide attempts and experience with depression. She talks of memory and time. as well as transitions ordered by a new language. Born in China which she left to go to college in Iowa, she writes in English. This is another moving memoir expanding my to-read list by a dozen or more titles. During the time she is unwell, she focuses on journals and letters: Tolstoy, Turgenev, Stefan Zweig, William Trevor, Katherine Mansfield. A cover blurb from Mary Gaitskill says it perfectly: "A must read for anyone trying to stay sane in a world that might be perceived as insane."


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My Reference Shelves

    My Reference Shelves (with thanks to Mark Lammers of http://www.wildershores.net/ for the idea)

    When I was in my mid-thirties, single and a bit lonely, living in a townhouse with a roommate who was not a reader, I was hired to work Sundays in a bookstore in Larkspur, CA. During the week, I had a regular job suitable to my marketing degree but this afternoon stint was my nirvana. We were allowed to read any book in the store as long as we treated it with care and took off the dust jacket. For Christmas, we got to choose one title as our gift. I chose The Complete Oscar Wilde. After a year or two, I threw caution to the wind and took a managerial position running a new Doubleday bookstore opening in San Rafael. A huge store of 5,000 square feet, much of the backlist was provided, but I had ample leeway to buy anything I thought would sell. And I could buy books at cost.  I went crazy, like the proverbial cat with catnip or chocoholic left in the sweet shop, I decided that this was the time to amass the reference collection of a lifetime. Even though I didn't speak German or Italian or Latin yet alone Kurdish, I knew I needed dictionaries in these languages. Every payday I brought home at least one of the books listed below. Then I married Michael,  a fellow bibliophile, and the collection expanded. When we knew we were moving back to Seattle, perhaps never to have access to books at cost again, we went into overdrive. Now, after years of service, one day they will have to go, be weeded and sent to a library sale.  We have Google.


Guide to Mexican Witchcraft
Spurred by a friend's interest in full moons south of the border, we used this for ritual ideas.
Webster's New Geographical Dictionary
A Child's Geography of the World (hillyer)
Once there was no Google and we looked up obscure lakes and islands and seas in these helpful tomes.

The Penguin Dictionary of Saints
Not for religious reasons, but for literary purposes, I was glad to have this at hand when a saint was referenced in a novel or poem.

Modern Proverbs and Proverbial Sayings
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs
Who doesn't love a proverb? A picture is worth a thousand words. Don’t judge a book by its cover. Easy come,easy go.

Concise Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English: From a Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English by Eric Pa
New Dictionary of American Slang
The Slang Dictionary: Or, the vulgar words, street phrases, and "fast" expressions of high and low society :  Many with Their Etymology, and a Few with Their History Traced - Scholar's Choice Edition
Before there was an Urban Dictionary online, there were slang dictionaries you could sit and pore over to learn new words and weird associations. "Juke box or juke joint" is possibly from the Gullah word "juk" meaning infamous and disorderly, but scholars still research the word and attribute it to West African Wolof, Bahamian or Haitian, or even Scottish roots. See, how easy it is to get lost in etymology.

Oxford Companion to Classical Literature
This is a gem if you care about poetry or literature. It won't be weeded.
The World Treasury of Children's Literature 
The New Guide to Modern World Literature
Not objective at all, I delight in the author's strong opinions.
Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia Masterpieces of world literature
Was it Heathcliff who died? Or Mr. Rochester?
The Penguin Book of Infidelities
The Oxford Companion to American Literature
The Oxford Companion to English Literature
The Oxford Companion to American Literature
These were my bibliophilic favorites, lists of books and authors and characters and plots. My passions ebbed and flowed back and forth between these and the travel bibliographies and the cooking bibliographies like The Traveler's reading guide : ready-made reading lists for the armchair traveler.
The American Guide: A Source Book and Complete Travel Guide for the United States

Dictionary of Art Terms and Techniques
The Remarkable Lives of 100 Women Artists (20th Century Women
Roman art and architecture
The Herder Dictionary of Symbols: Symbols from Art, Archaeology, Mythology, Literature, and Religion
You can't put this one down. Symbols indexed by shape.

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations : A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature
Macgill's Quotations in Context
Brush Up Your Shakespeare
Dictionary Travellers Quotations
The Oxford Book of Ages
Inquire Within or Three Thousand Seven Hundred Facts Worth Knowing
This very old book was a gift, tongue-in-cheek because I worked in library reference, but who could resist? A trivia addict's dream.

Schott's Original Miscellany 
New York Times Crossword Puzzle Dictionary by Tom Pulliam

Great Composers: Reviews and Bombardments by Bernard Shaw
The Lives of the Great Composers
The Encyclopedia of Jazz
New Kobbe's Complete Opera Book
The Grove Press Guide to the Blues on CD
"Rolling Stone" Jazz Record Guide
The NPR guide to building a classical CD collection

The New Biographical Dictionary of Film
Dark city : the lost world of film noir
Somewhere in the Night
The Film Encyclopedia
Movies, the Ultimate Insider's Guide
Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide
     Our is from the 90's. Internet headline reads "Ending After 45 Years – Internet Kills Iconic Print Paperback." With imdb.com and rottentomatoes.com, Leonard has crossed over online.

A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries

ABC for Book Collectors by John Carter

Uncommon Fruits & Vegetables : A Commonsense Guide
Fruit: A Connoisseur's Guide and Cookbook (Alan Davidson)
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
The New Food Lover's Companion by Sharon Tyler Herbst
Food Lover's Companion, The (Barron's Cooking Guide) 3rd Edition
The New Larousse Gastronomique: The Encyclopedia of Food, Wine & Cookery
Schott's Food and Drink Miscellany
Culinary Americana
Cookbooks Worth Collecting by Mary Barile
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America: 2-Volume Set
Food:  A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present by Jean-Louis Flandrin

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable by Ivor H. Evans
The Classic Fairy Tales (Opie)
Aegean Mythology
Mythology, Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes by Edith Hamilton
An Exaltation of Larks by James Lipton

The Penguin Book of Infidelities by Stephen Brook
The Oxford Book of Death (Oxford Books of Prose & Verse)
Dead Ends: An Irreverent Field Guide to the Graves of the Famous (Plume)
Infidelity and death, Oxford has us covered.

Kurdish/Turkish French English Dictionary
The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged by Jess Stein
Cassell's Standard French Dictionary by Denis Girard
Langenscheidt's Shorter German-English, English-German Dictionary
 Portuguese-English Dictionary (English and Portuguese Edition) by James L. Taylor
Collins-Sansoni Italian Dictionary by Vladimiro Macchi
Langenscheidt New College German Dictionary: German-English - English German T… by Langenscheidt
Col Robert French Dict (English, French and French Edition) by Robert Le
Langenscheidt's Pocket Dictionary: Spanish-English / English-Spanish (Engl… by Langenscheidt
Cassell's New Latin Dictionary (Thumb-indexed) by D. P. Simpson
Random House American College Dictionary 
The American College Dictionary by Clarence editor Barnhart
The Little Oxford Dictionary
Merriam-Webster Dictionary (pocket paperback)
The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, New 5th Edition (mass market, paperback) 2014 copyright
My mom played Scrabble regularly as did many friends. Now M and I play a couple times a week and update the dictionary with each new edition. We played daily on our rainy Mexican honeymoon and he never won. Now, he wins about one out of every three or four games and continues to improve. I do fine but stay the same, still forgetting if "le" is a word, or is it "te?" Le is not a word. Te is.

Roget's International Thesaurus 

Indian Herbology of North America
The American Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Gardening
American Horticultural Society A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants
The Apples of New York 
      How my pomologist (apple-grower) spouse coveted this, and finally there it was in a stack in MacLeod's Book Store in Vancouver, BC. Money was no object. This was the bible.
      Speaking of bibles, I do have a couple of King James editions with my name imprinted by devout grandparents, almost new.

Trees of Seattle: The Complete Tree-Finder's Guide to the City's 740 Varieties
Book of Fresh Flowers: A Complete Guide to Selecting and Arranging
The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds: Western Region (Audubon Society Field Guide Series)
National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Rocks and Minerals (National Audubon Society Field Guides)
National Audubon Society Field Guide to the Night Sky (Audubon Society Field Guide Series)
The National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Wildflowers: Western Region

These horticultural books and guides were heavily expanded during my gardening period which has now passed. I am not sure why, perhaps the knee replacements, perhaps the seduction was in planning not planting. The yard is stuffed with greenery, most of the exotics have passed on.

The New Encyclopaedia Britannica 15th Edition with Great Books
The 30-volume 1984 edition which we will still take out to do in-depth research. The last thing we sought was after a play about Alexander the Great and his teacher, Socrates. The Britannica info and the Great Books were exemplary resources.

Am I Alone Here?

I've just gotten my copy of Peter Orner's brilliant, odd, addictive book, Am I Alone Here? and want to sit in the sun and read it with a glass of hibiscus (jamaica) iced tea.  No sun  was apparent until about two o'clock but now it's back and I can divest my grey vest and welcome some warmth. The cover of the book shows stickies saying "notes on living to read" and "reading to live." Orner's crafted a memoir about living and reading. His authors are heavy hitters: Chekhov, Kafka, Welty, Walser, Juan Rulfo, Carver, Cheever, Berriault, Angela Carter and William Trevor. I turn to a later chapter where he says "I refuse to indulge in the senseless sport of ranking writers. Literature isn't rankable. It's us. Good, bad, moving, brilliant, tasteless, all of it is us." But he goes on to remind us " that while Herman Melville was toiling in the Customs House trying to pay off his bills, J. T. Headley, Charles Briggs and Fanny Forrester were the toast of literary America." He praises a favorite of Martha's, Gina Berriault's Women in Their Beds which he likes to have in every room.

When I was graduating from college and trying to decide where to turn in the next junction of my life, I took a standardized test which asked a number of questions on preferences to determine how your answers match those of people in specific fields. (Would you rather go to a party or stay home and read a book?) It was not any kind of aptitude or talent assessment, just amenability. I answered most like nightclub entertainers and librarians. I answered least like military officers. Had I paid attention to the tests, I would have gone right into the library science program at UW and retired a lot earlier with a bigger nest egg. Instead, I pursued an international marketing degree struggling through the statistics and accounting requirements to come up with no particular skills, experience or inclination other than a fondness for speaking Portuguese and reading Latin literature. And I ended up working the last twenty years working contentedly in reference at the library. Berriault says in The Infinite Passion of Expectation: "Always remember to contradict your teachers. It makes good biography." 

The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I first read The Leopard written by the wealthy Sicilian prince, Giuseppe Tomasi, Principe di Lampedusa (1896-1957), forty odd years ago and with age, my reaction has changed a bit. While I still appreciate the beautiful quality of the writing, the pace and the characterizations, I now relate more to the Prince and his thoughts about aging and change and history. He is melancholic, weary, cruel, yet still proud and elegant and seems to understand his situation. His once solidly exalted position as a nobleman is slipping away with Garabaldi's destruction of the Bourbon monarchy and he knows it. He is dying, as is his way of life, and he views his demise as consolation. He meets his nephew’s future father-in-law, the nouveau riche Don Calogero, with equanimity:

"Many problems that had seemed insoluble to the Prince were resolved in a trice by Don Calogero […] he moved through the jungle of life with the confidence of an elephant which advances in a straight line, rooting up trees and trampling down lairs, without even noticing scratches of thorns and moans from the crushed."

So many of the descriptions of the Prince, his courtesy, his lust, his confidence and complexity; the elaborate food served and those who devour it at his palace; the personalities of the characters, the servile but intelligent priest, the stalwart hunting companion, the whining wife, the proud, pious daughters, all seem to represent some aspect of Sicily or depict facets of the Sicilian character (which I’m so well positioned to comment on after a 3-week trip to Sicily last month! Not.) As the Prince says of his country when offered a position in the government,

"For more than twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogeneous civilization, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that of we could call our own. […] I don’t say that in complaint; it’s our fault.
This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and these monuments, even, of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing around like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction, who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn’t understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind."
As the book moves forward to the ball and the Prince observes those around him, he acknowledges the excess of his class, the inbreeding observed in the silly women at the party exclaiming “Maria.” He is calm and resolute. It is a well-drawn portrait of a complex man at a crucial time in Sicilian history.


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Hourglass: time, memory, marriage by Dani Shapiro

Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage by Dani Shapiro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Everything about this book struck a chord in me, the collage structure which winds back and forth through the years as one's mind does, the thoughts about marriage, about time. the snippets of memory, the comments on writing and teaching. I actually stalled so it wouldn't be finished. And then she concludes before a final journal entry from her honeymoon:

"Already my mind is a kaleidoscope. Years vanish. Months collapse. Time is like a tall building made of playing cards. It seems orderly until a strong gust of wind comes along and blows the whole thing skyward. Imagine it: an entire deck of cards soaring like a flock of birds. A song comes on the radio and now I am nursing my baby to sleep...I am...looking into his father's eyes for the first time, I am burying my own father. My mother. I am a girl watching her mother at her vanity table. I am holding M's hand a Jacob's college graduation. I am playing with my grandchildren in a house on a mountain. The phone rings. The doorbell. I understand something terrible with a thud in my heart. The plane, the car, the train, the bomb. The test results are ominous. I am wheeling M. down a corridor. We are playing golf in Arizona. We are homeless. We are living in Covent Garden, where we often attend the theater. Pick a card. Any card."


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A Personal Bookshelf

I just rediscovered a book on my shelves called My Ideal Bookshelf. Over one hundred creative types from a variety of disciplines (including authors) were asked to produce a small representative bookshelf of their favorite titles, books that have changed their lives, or made them who they are today. I thought this was a captivating idea and started thinking about my own shelf. And here's what I came up with: One Hundred Years of Solitude, All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers by Larry McMurtry (the only time I've ever seen anyone else signal this title is in the book by writer Chuck Klosterman), Poems of Elizabeth Bishop, Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Art of Mexican Cooking by Diana Kennedy, A Visit to Don Otavio by Sybille Bedford, Consider the Oyster by M F K Fisher, Out of This Century by Peggy Guggenheim, Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison, Catcher in the Rye, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Essays of E. B. White, Early Autumn by Robert B. Parker, Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz, the NYT Cookbook. Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson.

Send me your own shelf. What titles influenced your life?

I want to add more and more this is just my first off-the-top effort. I am trying to combine the bookselling years when I read and sold mysteries with the Latin American Studies years when I discovered Garcia-Marquez but I ought to drop some of the Latins for the odd European writer, certainly a Brit. I've read a lot of Brits in my time. Forster's Howard's End and A Passage to India, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Mansfield's stories, that big Bloomsbury bio of what's-his-name, Ralph Partridge? which was mostly about Spain. Then with a nod at Curtis, Flannery O'Connor's stories, Garcia-Lorca's poetry and that of Denise Levertov. More poets such as Sexton, Forche, Williams, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Larkin, Neruda. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver. All of Joan Didion and, at the same time, I was gobbling up Robert Stone (Flag for Sunrise), and At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matthiessen. Thank God for google in my dotage when I remember Robert but can't get Stone without a search. And there it is, instantly. And that lovely little book on Venice by Link? And the other Brodsky book on Venice. And Hemingway? His letters? His short stories. Post Office by Charles Bukowski?And that big fat reference by someone, Martin Seymour-Smith's New Guide to Modern World Literature which listed every 20th C. author around the world and gave an authoritative and opinionated appraisal in a sentence or two. There was Vonnegut and Muriel Spark and even earlier Aldous Huxley and Anais Nin. 1984. Geoff Dyer. Nick Hornby. What about Nabokov? Julia Child? Edith Wharton? Stephen Spender's Diaries. Steinbeck.Faulkner? The Russians? Pat's reading Simone de Beauvoir whom I've never read. In fact, other than Flaubert, I haven't read a lot of French writers. Francoise Sagan of course in my very young days and the expats in early 19C Paris. I see a lot of Lydia Davis here among others' notable books and Lorrie Moore, too. Not so much Shakespeare. Murakami, yes. Evelyn Waugh. The most obscure titles show up under a photographer, Alec Soth, from Minnesota. I only recognize his Wallace Stevens and WCW as well as Nicholson Baker and a book on Alice Neel. Henry Green's Loving shows up. No one has read him. He's supposedly a writer's writer so there you are. There's more of Harold McGee than I'd expect - he writes on the science of cooking.

But as I go through these shelves, I am thinking I should toss all this new stuff I spend so much time with. Get rid of it and go back to the classics, the tried and true. There is only so much time left. Read some quality. Tonight I am reading the new George Saunders and it's good, Lincoln in the Bardo. I now see Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, next month's book club choice, leap forward from Vendela Vida's page (she is a modern writer I've read). And Dani's favorite Ayelet Waldman has a few newer writers Ondaatje, Eggers, McEwan, Naipaul, St. Aubyn, and Jane Gardam's Old Filth and of course her husband, Michael Chabon, plus Shirley Jackson and Jane Austen. Some Harvard professor lists Now We Are Six by A. A. Milne which would hearten Helen but someone else lists her nemesis, Clarice Lispector. An artist mentions Niki de Saint Phalle's Remembering 1930-1949 which I must look up. Jane Eyre should be in my own shelf. Alice Waters includes Marcel Pagnol (there he is in my bookcase), Wendell Berry, Richard Olney along with expected food writers about the hearth and the wine.

I am walking through the house, examining my shelves, looking at LibraryThing where most of my titles are catalogued, and becoming verklempt over the satisfaction I've gotten from my books over the years, not just reading them but lending, fondling and perusing. How can I even begin to weed?